Steven Heath writes "Newzealand.com has been a subject of a previous article in ICANNWatch with the Queen being accused of Bad Things(tm).

Well, back before Christmas it was rumoured that after the humiliating UDRP outcome that the applicant went and purchased the domain name from Virtual Countries. Well, very recently newzealand.com had changed registrant details. The details now have a company called The New Zealand Way Ltd as the registrant. A check of the New Zealand Companies Office shows that this company is an arm of the NZ Government.

Now comes the interesting bit. Today a question was asked in Parliament of the Minister of Tourism about how much the name cost."

"The response was $500,000 USD (over $1 Million NZD).

$1 Million dollars of taxpayers money was used after a failed UDRP bid. Money well spent? Lets see if the NZ public has anything to say. Further updates on .nz news & views on any public reaction."

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I see that using their proper namespace under .govt.nz apparently wasn't even considered as an option for this governmental entity instead of inappropriately (and expensively!) using a dot-com address that implies that they're a commercial entity.